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Our love/hate relationship with electronics

Author:
Sonia Brugger
Host Vessel:
R/V Savannah

It is Thursday, Septemeber 25th. We are currently three days into a two week long cruise off of the coast of Georgia and inside the local estuaries. The mission of the current expidition is the same as the first cruise I went on as a marine technician intern. In some ways its sort of fitting...to start and end my time as an intern with the same group of scientists. Sadly this is the same group that I had to struggle to get to understand the basic concept of safe science.

Luckily it seems like they have finally began to pick up on the fact that I'm not joking when I say hard hats, life vests, and closed toed shoes must be worn at all times when doing over the side opperations. Or that when they are running the CTD that you must subtract at least 1.5m from the actually depth to ensure the package does not slam into the seafloor.

While both of those are very concerning matters, I am currently focused on a much more stressful problem...why our SCSserver has decided to continously crash and bluescreen. I have noticed that the SCSserver has been sopratically shutting itself down for the past week+. Originally I thought it was John who shut it down while we were at dock (still sort of strange seeing we generally keep it running 24/7), however when it crashed on the first day of the cruise I realized that we have a much bigger problem on our hands.

John's inital fix was to change out the server power supply, thinking that a dying power supply was causing the problems...however the server crashed again that night. After I did some researching on the blue screen codes, and asked some friends for help, we managed to narrow it down to a few possible issues. While troubleshooting I attempted to do a restart where I pulled out the power cord and held the power button for 30 seconds. By leaving the power unplugged for 5-10 minutes this would drain any remaining power from the motherboard and clear the NVRAM. When this solution didn't work John took the server case off and reseated the ram sticks and cleaned out the fans to insure proper ventilation...however this also failed. The next solution I tried was to do a system restore...this is done by holding F8 while powering it up...this would supposedly give me access to a menu where I could select "Repair Computer"....the problem is whoever originally set up the server did not enable the access of this command...Finally I went back to researching the error codes in hopes of getting more insight. What I found was that one of the errors displayed had to do with a program called Sonic Solutions, which is pretty much a driver controling the DVD drive. Supposedly the sonic solutions driver is known to cause blue screen errors when used on a Windows 2003 server (mini rant= Windows 2003 is no longer supported by Microsoft...so why in the world are we using such out dated software...all the important scientific software should be able to run on a newer server setup by now= rant over). So after removing the Sonic solutions software I am currently waiting to see if the server crashes again. Honestly I have a feeling it will...I have a feeling that the server is crashing for a mix of reasons not limited to the Sonic solution program and probably a corrupted hard drive....

Anyways....computers can be evil sometimes, but if my solution works and stops the crashing it's going to be the best feeling in the world.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers DRL/ITEST 1312333 and DUE/ATE 1104310. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.